Reading

  • The required texts include The Brief Penguin Handbook, Webster Dictionary, and for fall semester only a novel read by all freshmen during the summer and/or first weeks of fall semester. The Writing Director, Holly Blackford, has several copies of a teaching guide with writing activities, which you can peruse and photocopy. Choices of short stories, essays, poems, and visual texts are your purview (students should read about 50-70 pages of prose per week, while also writing). Here are guidelines:
  • Choose a thematic topic of inquiry for the course, so students can pursue writing with the depth that they will be expected to demonstrate in other college courses. The course readings need to have intellectual coherence for the students to consistently revise and develop their own thoughts.

  • The focus of the course is writing, but reading skills are the best predictor of writing skills, because the two processes are intensely interconnected. Thus you should spend a significant period of time with one substantial (complex) piece of literature, teaching reading and writing together and providing the student with the opportunity to spend a substantial period of the course with one work.

  • Toward this purpose, instructors have successfully used Frankenstein (especially in the fall), The Invisible Man, The World According to Garp, Beloved, and The Joy Luck Club. These types of works take 3-4 weeks for the writing class to cover. They are best accompanied by a variety of essays on the works, to prepare students for their research exercise in MLA or Gale database (in 102, they will have to broaden their usage of databases to other disciplines).

  • Choosing a Norton critical edition provides the students with opportunities to read accessible critical essays and reviews of a piece of literature. In the writing course, a poem and accompanying essay on the immigrant experience could take two weeks. A play can give you the opportunity for classroom activities involving writing adaptation.
  • Essays on contemporary concerns (which can be found in The New Humanities Reader) give students the opportunity to read and write about topics relevant to their worlds, while themes like coming-of-age, race, gender, or class give them contexts for understanding themselves. For example, one instructor had her 101 students research not literature but their own immigrant histories and the historical context for their family decisions. This was the most popular research assignment among librarians, who assisted the students with this effort.
  • Students should also be exposed to a variety of materials in the classroom, such as newspaper articles, films, images, websites, illustrations, and ads, to which they can critically respond. Most students are familiar with a multimedia approach in the English classroom (expanded book sites on the web, MOOS based upon fiction, etc.) and should be ready to incorporate the "critical reading and viewing" section of the Penguin Handbook into discussion and writing skills.

  • Students should be taught the dynamic role of words and graphics in today's culture; words and images distill major concepts. In their jobs and college courses they will encounter and be asked to produce a variety of conceptual maps.
  • Accordingly, you will:

- capitalize upon visual literacy skills by having them attend to densely packed words, denotative and connotative meanings in poetry, ads, websites
- expose them to web forms that organize and combine ideas for readers
- expose them to expanded book sites and hyper-texts
- expose them to poetry and the ability of words to control response
- expose them to stylistic analysis and ask students to imitate various styles of writing
- assign them letters to write to high school students, for which we have a Diversity grant
- assign them the task of giving the high school students feedback on the effectiveness of their letters and prose
- expose them to analysis of argument, such that students gain practice extrapolating the thesis and structure of essays in their own work
- assign word research exercises in which they look up the history of key words, teaching them the evolution of meaning by convention and usage
  • Choose readings that are both accessible and a bit challenging for them; that lend themselves to a variety of writing topics and interpretations (you don't want to read 20 essays on one topic); that are ambiguous enough for students to take positions; that are controversial enough to inspire debate; that are well written, to engage students in powerful uses of language.

  • You may choose your own works, use one of the multicultural readers in my office, or build your own collection with a publisher's website.

  • Many instructors like to find out schedules for exhibits in the area or performances at Rutgers to coordinate with their readings. Your class is the students' first introduction to individualized instruction at Rutgers; you need to both impart enthusiasm for college-level work and spend your time challenging them to achieve higher standards of writing. Do not choose readings that you do not know; you need your time and energies for teaching writing.



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